jaclaz

You need to understand the concept of "voltage". Voltage is a "level", or more exactly a electric potential difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Voltage Take two common batteries and a multimeter as an example: -[battery]+-[battery]+ 0 1 2 if you measure voltage between 0 and 2 you will read 3 V, and if you measure voltage between 0 and 1 you will read 1.5 V, but if you measure between 1 and 2 you will read 1.5 V as well: between 2 and 0 there are 3V as (1.5+1.5)-0=3 Vbetween 1 and 0 there are +1.5-0=1.5 Vbetween 2 and 1 there are 3-1.5=1.5 VIf you prefer point 2 is at +3 V over ground level (i.e. relative to point 0) and at level +1.5 V relative to point 1. The TTL levels used in this hard disk and converter use very "narrow" intervals, and signals are transmitted at a relatively high speed, so an even minimal difference in the "base level" can lead to mis-communication. The idea is that if ALL the ground or 0 level points of ALL devices involved are connected together, they are ALL at the same level, a so-called equipotential connection or isopotential locus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipotential this allows the "peaks" (which are the actual 0's and 1's transmitted) to be at the correct level, because they "share a common base". More in detail, according to specs a "peak" measured between the Tx and Ground between 0.35 V and 0.8 V is a "0", and a "peak" measured between the Tx and Ground between 2.0 V and 3.3 V is a "1". If the TTL converter sends a "0" by sending an impulse at 0.6 V, but the ground (for whatever reason) is locally at 0.21 volts, a connected device with ground at the proper level of 0 V may "receive" it at 0.6+0.21=0.81 V and fail to "understand" it as being a "0", since these peaks are transmitted at a 38400 baud/rate there is the added complication of transition times (from 0 to the peak and back). When doing a loopback test this is not an issue, as there is no other device connected and of course the Tx and Rx of the converter share a "common base". If the loopback tests do not succeed, you have in your hands a *somehow* defective hardware, if you do the loopback test a the TTL level you have no way to know if the defective part is the USB to RS-232 or the RS-232 to TTL converter, so you should additionally do a loopback test on the RS-232 terminals, pinout and howto can be found here: http://www.ni.com/tutorial/3450/en/ Be careful, the RS-232 has a relatively high voltage level, and if you misplace some connection you can "fry" something. All in all, if you feel not familiar enough with the involved matters, are you sure you don't have a (local of course) friend with some more experience in the field? There is nothing actually complex *anyone* with a very minimal electric/electronic experience or education can do properly the testing (and the grounding). jaclaz

Well, just for the record, dosbox's Ctrl+F11/Ctrl+F12, are very handy: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance#How_to_speed_up.2Fslow_down_DOSBox And for Qemu there is Qemu brake: http://www.miroslavnovak.com/qemu-brake_en.php jaclaz

Yes and no, the fact that a similar setup has it's own drawbacks doesn't mean that it is anyway unreliable, after all RAM is used much more than storage on any computer and it has proved to be a very solid piece of hardware, in my experience it is very rare that a stick of memory becomes bad, usually defective memory sticks are either DOA or suffer a very early death (though of course it is possible that they wear out over the years of use, I don't think there is an actual "wear" or degrading performances as there can be for SSD's) anyway, to remain OFF topic While, almost back on topic, the issues with the proposed setup are not that much, you would need a good UPS, and - just like we did in the good ol'times - in the morning you would switch on the PC, go get a cup of coffee and by the time you are back the OS would be fully loaded, then you could work all day on the very fast/responsive thingy and when leaving you would need to wait a few minutes because during the shutdown changes would need to be committed to permanent storage, with some tricks (thinking of something like a rsync demon running in the background) the amount of data to be committed may be very little and the shutdown could be quite fast. Just for the record, many, many years ago I used to have workstations that at shutdown robocopied changed data files to a network storage for redundancy/backup and it wasn't that bad. jaclaz

Sure they don't, but the way they are represented may , the fact that 9 machines in the list actually belong to the Author of the patch may influence the attribution of "most" and "some". DATA don't lie. jaclaz

Sure , until Windows 95 came out everything manufactured by mankind, including cars, bridges and buildings was designed by hand on paper, Adobe and Autodesk only exist because of Windows 95, a Lotus 123 was just an extremely small British car and your dad's accountant used an abacus to calculate the taxes. Not that this did not actually happen in recent enough times, but you are some 10-15 years off in the dates. To be fair a fairly good (but not exceptional) PC, something that would have been called an "Engineering Workstation" at the time, circa 1985 would have easily costed 8-12 monthly wages of the actual engineer, the PC and DOS was a (costly) device used at work, not something that was in every home. jaclaz

It's on the Wayback machine alright (as suggested in that thread) Here: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://download.microsoft.com/download/winntwks40/Utility/4.71.1015.0/NT4/EN-US/WIN_DEPLOY.exe These ones are seemingly fine: https://web.archive.org/web/20060320022750/http://download.microsoft.com/download/winntwks40/Utility/4.71.1015.0/NT4/EN-US/WIN_DEPLOY.exe https://web.archive.org/web/20080222200834/http://download.microsoft.com/download/winntwks40/Utility/4.71.1015.0/NT4/EN-US/WIN_DEPLOY.exe What is the problem? jaclaz

I have one thing to say about speed, which is: As a side note, yet another way, WHOLE OS and programs on Ramdisks, of course a tadbit slow at power on, but once loaded very, very fast: http://reboot.pro/topic/20487-any-tut-on-expanding-c-partition-on-many-ramdisk/ jaclaz

Well, to be fair, people who have not used RAMDISK's (which I perceive is what this thread is about ) often don't understand the potential for the further increase of the level of responsiveness. Of course such a setup has it's own drawbacks, unlike the switch from conventional HDD's to SSD's which is perfectly "transparent" and surely it is much more costly on a per Gb base. Should you have some (several) spare C-notes, you can do with it something really nice (JFYI): http://www.bjorn3d.com/2013/01/ramdisks-maximizing-high-capacity-ram/ jaclaz

As said I was just kidding, without any intention to offend, nor to insult anyone or anything. I'm really really sorry, I apologise unreservedly. I take it back and offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, and was in no way fair comment, and was motivated purely by malice, and I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you, or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future. Is this OK with you? However, to be picky and just for the record, MS-DOS 7.1 (though it includes Qbasic alright) is not a complete OS, it is part of some Windows operating systems, (namely Windows 95 OSR 2, Windows 95 OSR 2.5, Windows 98, and Windows 98 SE). jaclaz

Sure , I was referring to the "usual plot" : http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/173609-btach-set-vast-with-echo-doesnt-work/#entry1096004 just kidding.... jaclaz

... right when I was reasonably convinced that our friend Gunsmokingman would have not been able to post a VBS script .... You can never be sure of anything.... jaclaz

Yep : ... and when they happen to discuss the matter on a same thread, it becomes an useful resource to calculate an appropriate size of the pageflie (fixed, NOT dynamic) if you actually want/need a full dump: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/151195-frequent-but-inconclusive-bsods/ I would guess a few benjamins changing hands Just in case : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378194/quotes?item=qt0335291 jaclaz

And, just for the record, C#/XAML or Silverlight developers (do the latter still exist? ) have no excuses now: http://appdevelopermagazine.com/1960/2014/9/30/New-Extension-for-Visual-Studio-Released-to-Create-HTML5-Apps-Using-C/ http://www.cshtml5.com/#learn-more And some considerations: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/689534/What-to-Choose-between-XAML-and-JavaScript-for-win Of course if you are going to write (say) an AutoCAD or Photoshop alternative for tablets , C#/XAML is likely to be faster but limited to the Windows ecosystem that seemingly very few people will use, but for the 90% of apps that at the most try to be an alternative to Candy Crush Saga or Ruzzle would make much more sense due to almost transparent portability to the other tablet platforms to use HTML5 ... jaclaz

There is not a "built-in" prevision in COMMAND.COM (it was introduced in CMD:EXE). You can use a third party tool or a "workaround" making use of choice in a loop or using a temp file and redirection (nasty) or using a CALL (to "self"), see: http://www.infionline.net/~wtnewton/batch/batguide.html#4 There is also a trick using ANSI conversion: http://www.robvanderwoude.com/userinput.php#DOS the latter link above contains links to commonly used third party tools,personally I would use editvar: http://www.westmesatech.com/editv.html jaclaz

Sure , that would be too simple (and smart ), surely they managed to put some Silverlight and some .Net and some super-sharp C or D in them. As said elsewhere I find it fun that the actual contents of - say - 90% of "apps" (including the iOS and the Andorid ones, not only the Windows ones) could be relatively easily reproduced in a "common" browser (using HTML5), yet they are "packaged" into an "app". jaclaz

Please do read the given link posts: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/page-153#entry968299 AND the read-me-first (which is here if you haven't found it): http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/143880-seagate-barracuda-720011-read-me-first/ ALL in "ALL devices must be grounded together" means "ALL", it doesn' t mean "some" or "a few" or "a part", how do you say "Todos os dispositivos ..." in Brazil ? If needed think octopus : http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/?p=968346 (which you would have found had you actually read the given link) jaclaz

Well, personally I would consider that an "offer" when the good MS guys will propose to pay me some good amount of US$ (Euros would do also nicely) in order to download and install that crap.... jaclaz

The pagefile has two main uses: a. to "help" in case of high RAM usage (more than available RAM) b. to make a dump of memory in case of crash Some programs however, as an example some Adobe ones, will *want* the presence of a pagefile in order to even start. There are three theories on which everyone is arguing about since years: 1) the pagefile is better left alone and MS (actually the Windows OS) can manage it fine 2) the pagefile makes little sense if there is *enough* RAM but since it is needed by some program the best thing is to have one FIXED size (NOT system managed) as small as possible. 3) the pagefile makes no sense whatsoever if there is *enough* RAM Since I don't use any program that actually wants a pagefile I have run Windows 2K and XP systems without a pagefile just fine, JFYI: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/156944-delete-not-clear-pagefile-at-shutdown/ but it's not something that should be done at home. Making a Dynamic pagefile makes anyway very little (please read as "no") sense. If you believe that you need a full RAM dump on crash you need to set it's fixed size to at least the size of RAM the system has. Please understand how all the people that can actually use the info in a several Gb RAM dump for troubleshooting can be counted on your fingers. The good ol' rule of the thumb about 1.5 to 2.5x the amount of RAM makes no sense whatsoever (it was accurate enough when systems had 128, 256 or 512 Mb of RAM, but not nowadays with 3 or more GB of RAM). Given that on the same modern machine that has *enough* RAM there is also *enough* space on hard disk, a FIXED size pagefile 500 Mb or 1 Gb in size is more than enough (unless you really-really want to save space on hard disk) but making one the size of the RAM wouldn't make any harm (if not taking up a few more Gb's), and as well using a "magic formula" like 1.5 x RAM will do the same, only taking even some more space on disk. Still given that the machine has *enough* RAM, there will be NO difference whatsoever in performance with *any* of the settings, the pagefile will never be actually used if not in case of crash. The advice to set it as fixed derives from the fact that in some cases of crash a dynamic pagefile will expand possibly overwriting some areas of the disk where some data needed for recovery resides (a very remote possibility, but still a possibility) and anyway it will take more time to crash (while you can't do anything about it). JFYI, there are people that believe to be smart to put the pagefile on a RAMdisk (on systems with plenty of RAM), something that, in the words of Mark Russinovich, is ridiculous: http://www.overclock.net/t/1193401/why-it-is-bad-to-store-the-page-file-on-a-ram-disk The new rule of the thumb is "try the system, if you never hit the max amount of RAM you have you are good to go, if you consistently go over it, add more RAM, settings of the pagefile make not any difference in real life if there is *enough* RAM". jaclaz

Check again GROUNDing of ALL devices involved, see the Read-Me-First point #7 and a few posts starting from here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/page-153#entry968299 Try a loopback test (that would be point #8 of the Read-Me-First). jaclaz

Maybe the time has come for a new Gay Mullins : http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20091141,00.html Old Windows Users of America, it sounds fine.... jaclaz

Bump! (#2) jaclaz

Thank you , but that's one good thing of the board software, this thread has now 100 (one hundred) views, evidently once detracted a few ones possibly caused by me or by some bots, all by people that share your lack of familiarity with the topic at hand since there was (yet) no useful reply. I guess that we can define it moderately popular but possibly too "narrow" or too "specific" even for a dedicated section like: Of course there are possible alternative explanations , we'll see if anyone comes out with some ideas/suggestions. jaclaz

OT But I guess that NoelC might find this interesting: http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/169396-Need-details-of-Comcast-quot-xfinitywifi-quot-public-wi-fi-hotspot-I-m-hosting https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/xfinity-wifi-hotspots https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/disable-xfinity-wifi-home-hotspot/ jaclaz

Well, it wasn't a PM, you do not *need* to justify yourself . jaclaz

Bump! jaclaz